Clarice Cliff - Her Life in a Nutshell

Clarice Cliff brought something brand new to the dinner table that had become way too dour for it's own good whilst her name conjured up bright and beautiful, coloured pottery typical of the 1930's style design known as Art Deco.

She has been called a "cozy genius" and prices for her mass-market tableware continue to soar. She was the daughter of Ann and Harry Cliff and had two brothers and five sisters.

Continental Business Class

In 1927 Clarice Cliff's employer, Colley Shorter of A.J. Wilkinson, arranged for her to study sculpture for a few months at the Royal College of Art, London and was always encouraged by him. Cliff was a natural who transmitted the "jazz style" of 1920s Paris to sleepy Stoke-on-Trent and later she and Colley Shorter were married in 1940, soon after the death of his first wife, who had been an invalid for many years.

Colley Shorter himself died in 1963, after which Clarice left the business world, selling the two firms to Midwinters in 1964 and living quietly in retirement in the suburb of Clayton, south of Stoke-on-Trent. Since then her wares have become highly collectable, with prices running into many thousands of pounds for exceptional pieces. This outstanding potter designed over 500 shapes and 2000 patterns. Her exuberant expression of self-taught naivety brought condemnation from design theorists in the 1930s soon after her pottery first appeared and from historians in more recent years.

As a working-class woman, they say, Cliff bravely made her way in the world, while the design reformers of modernisation preached to an almost empty church. She was of course, lucky to be given such a catchy name perfectly complementing the faux-continental quality of her pottery designs which delighted the public when launched in 1928.

From the year of Clarice Cliff's death in 1972, when the first large exhibition of her work was held in Brighton, these jumpy objects delighted a younger generation all over again and continue to do so to this day.

Clarice Cliff - Her Life in a Nutshell

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